I was reading an article in the Guardian today about the permafrost reaching what scientists call a tipping point and I realized that very few people know what that means, since, if they do know, nobody seems to be doing anything about it, most tragically those who have been charged with running our governments.
And it got me thinking that it is not just a lack of knowledge or even a failure of communication that is the source of the collective nightmare that we are going through but a fundamental disconnect – a huge gap – between all the things that we as a species know and all the things that we as a species do, that is, between knowledge and action or knowing and doing.
In this case, there are thousands of scientists around the world who know a great deal about various tipping points and why they are important for our future and the future of the planet and learn more about them every day in research projects that are mainly funded by public agencies but whose actions betray them and us, in particular, the actions they take by choosing to publish most of the fruits of their knowledge in highly specialized journals that are owned by giant corporations that are extremely costly to gain access to if you aren’t a scientist or would-be scientist yourself. In order to have their articles published which is one of the main criteria of academic success they must sign contracts giving ownership of what is called their “intellectual property” to those giant corporations whose “business model” seems to be to make money by creating ever more specialized journals that university libraries then subscribe to at great expense. And to make matters worse, many of those articles are written in such a way that they can only be understood by those who already know what’s in them. When I was a professor it often seemed as if an elaborate system had been put in place to keep scientific knowledge from reaching “ordinary” people.
At the same time. and partly as a result of these ridiculous but highly profitable forms of scientific publishing, there are billions of people who know nothing about such things as tipping points and act as if they did not exist since the knowledge they can freely and readily obtain without a “pay wall” is filled not just with lies and falsehoods about climate change and most everything else, but quite often with a disdain for science itself. And even worse perhaps, most of our “leaders” and governments act in wilful neglect of what they know or should know not just about tipping points or climate change but about almost everything on their watch.
So until scientists change the ways they go about spreading the fruits of their knowledge and governments do what they know they should do, it’s hard to imagine avoiding those tipping points or, for that matter, doing aĺl the things that what we as a species know need to be done.
Anyway here’s the article:
And here’s John Lennon’s great old song:
AndrewJamison 